SOMETHING GOOD

adj: desirable, beneficial, worthy, beautiful, pleasing

“That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.” Romans 8:28

I am a “glass-half-full” kind of person. Most of the time, I’m optimistic even to a fault. I love to look for the good.

One year in my classroom, I taught my students to play what I called, “The Glad Game.” It was a Pollyanna kind of game in which we tried to find something positive about everything–even to the point of ridiculousness. We did it for fun, and it lifted our spirits for sure.

But despite our lighthearted games and positive attitudes, life brings us some things that are really hard for our hearts to take. Illness. Disappointment. Loss. Heartache. Separation. Failure. Things that don’t seem to have any possibility of a good outcome or a happy ending.

A friend of mine lost her business recently. She is really grieving. She has spent most of her years on this company–dreaming and working and investing everything she had. Gone are the employees she loved, gone are the daily customers she had welcomed into her shop, and gone is the income her family depended on.

She commented about “making lemonade,” referring to the quote we often hear in rough times: “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” And with her positive attitude, she will stir a little sweetness into this heartbreak and find a way to move forward through the pain.

But the real difference for this friend of mine is that she also has faith.

Faith in Jesus who loves us with a deeply personal, wildly extravagant love that wraps around our hurting and fearful hearts.

Faith in Jesus who has all the power we could possibly need to answer our desperate prayers.

Faith in Jesus whose faithful presence is so much more reassuring than a silly game or a lemonade analogy.

Faith in Jesus who redeems every single thing we bring to him.

I know my friend and her family and her future will be okay. And more than okay, actually, because God is working all things–every detail of her life–into something good.

Jesus doesn’t just sugar-coat our struggles to try to make them more acceptable.

He asks us to bring them to him and let him make them matter.

Can we trust that our awful and heartbreaking things can be redeemed? Can we truly depend on him to bring new life, new understanding, new relationships, new breakthroughs, a new closeness to him? Can we hold on to the truth that he is constantly, lovingly, incomprehensibly working all things together for good?

Invite Him In

Thank him for rising from death to life to give us his ultimate gift of redemption. You can place the big, scary things, the seemingly insignificant things that no one understands, and everything in-between into his hands. He wants to work all of your things together for beautiful, overwhelming good.